A River of Data Runs Through It: Examining Urban Circulations in the Digital Age

Abstract

There is a deepening need for dialogue between (digital) urbanists and Internet Studies scholarship. In this paper we are interested in "urbanizing" Internet Studies by thinking about how digital infrastructures create and control circulations, movement, flows, and streams within urban contexts. More specifically, we think about circulations and concentrations of natural, human, and digital resources by way of Urban Political Ecology to better understand smart cities, digital urban labor, and Anthropocene literatures. As data, infrastructures, apps, capital, and natural phenomena concentrate in cities, and are instantiated to create and constrain flows and circulations, we contend that Internet Studies can play a key role in analyzing and understanding these new socio-technical entanglements. Drawing on Nost and Goldstein's notion of "data infrastructures", we think about how the materiality of data and digital technologies shape cities, and cities shape data and technologies. We suggest several conceptual and methodological overlaps with Urban Political Ecology, to signal what an urbanized Internet Studies, concentrated on circulations and flows, might look like.